Jack from 22cans here. Firstly, thank you for being so patient with us. We’re aware that we’ve been quiet for a long long time, but there’s a good reason for this. When we released GODUS Early Access, the amount of feedback we received was overwhelming. We took it on board too. We continued to release updates every couple of weeks but whilst this new content was welcomed there was an underlying problem. The key issues were not cosmetic or about the additional content. They were about the foundations of the game itself.

What this meant was that whilst we were putting our efforts into small updates, the main problems with GODUS persisted. We had to make a tough choice - either keep updating the game in little, often cosmetic chunks, or to open up the hood and get down to fixing the guts of the game. We chose the latter. Your feedback consistently highlighted the most crucial, deep-seated issues, though and that gave us a roadmap. But game development being what it is, this would make the game unplayable for months. In fact in many areas the game would actually get worse before it got better.

We released a video update explaining the new direction we were going in, but since then there’s been nothing new to report on other than the continuing steady progress of the team. Owing to the volume of work our small team of 22 passionate individuals would have to take on, it also made it hard for us to maintain the same amount of contact that we have had with you, the backers, up until the last release. We even hired 5 additional experts to help us get the game in good shape.

This update has been a while coming and we thank everyone who entered the Early Access for their patience. It’s taken a while because we made the decision to avoid trivial updates that would prolong the core problems. Instead we’ve rebuilt the foundations of the game based on the strong feedback we’ve received from players. For this we also thank you - your involvement has literally reshaped the experience. We hope you enjoy the new aspects of the game and continue to look out for ongoing content updates as well as other refinements. To enable us to deliver this new version, it means that previous saves are no longer compatible. We do apologise for this inconvenience but we know it was the best decision for the overall game.

Wonderful new interfacing with the world (LESS CLICKING!) - Every interaction with the world has been rethought to be more fluid and less frustrating. You can now hold and drag easily to interact with trees, rocks and belief.

Improved Sculpting - Moving the land is much more accurate and more responsive. You’ll be able to move further and with more control. And rest assured, sculpting will continue to improve even more! No more repeated clicking - you just hold and drag in any direction, at any speed.

Introducing the Leash - We’ve waved goodbye to the clumsy totem power. Now you can hold on any number of Followers or occupants, then drag towards a destination in the world and release on it to send them there. It’s a big advance and feels lovely!

Complete redesign of the cards system - Now players discover cards across a timeline and unlock them by applying stickers that are found in the world. You choose which cards to unlock and thus your people’s advances will be unique to you. As time goes on each player’s civilisation will become vastly different from the others.

Brand new GUI implementation - Much sweat and many tears have gone in to a more intuitive and beautiful interface with which to play the game.

Voyages of Discovery - A brand new game mode where you must guide your Followers across uncharted lands against the clock. There are special rewards for successful voyages!

Explore a new Homeworld - Start your Followers on a new journey, with a completely re-authored landscape to explore.

New God Powers - Put out fires and increase the beauty of trees with the Rain of Purity, or customise your world by planting trees with the God Seed power.

Reengineered Follower Behaviour - We’ve implemented a much more intelligent Follower system that gives unique attributes to each follower’s brain and makes them react to the world.

Countless redesigns, gameplay tweaks, and bug fixes - Months of hard work has gone into improvements to the experience. There are so many that we couldn’t start to list them, but you’ll feel them throughout.

What’s NOT in the latest build?We’ve taken out the aspects of the game that we feel aren’t quite up to the quality of the new refinements. We’re still working on these, though, so rest assured they will return/appear in the future.

Story mode

Battles

Meteor

Hubworld

Extra ages

Extra Settlements

As you’ve just read, we’ve been hard at work. The nature of game development is such that it’s taken time to prepare this major improvement package. However, in doing so, we’ve learned that listening to our wide and dedicated base of supporters works well, and we thank you for directly influencing us and helping to make, and now to improve, the entire GODUS experience. We look forward to your next round of feedback, and will use it to continue moving GODUS along the path towards greatness.

Peter and I have also prepared a video (here) to talk through all the changes we’ve been making to the game. Thank you once more for bearing with us and we hope you’ll now try this new, improved GODUS for yourselves!

There seems to be an issue with the windows of the game. On every resolution, both windowed and fullscreen I get that the belief counter, the timeline shortcut and the settings icon are located more or less outside the screen. Is this a general bug or me experiencing an error?

Loving the update - An hour into the game, I am getting visual artifacts - It is like a checkerboard of black squares that roate across the entire screen. Deosn't make the game unplayable, but very distracting. Just exited out to restart the game to see if it goes away.

Also: In the descroption that takes about getting rid of rocks and trees: There is no mention that if you hold the mouse down and drag across the screen, you'll keep getting rid of rocks or trees (depending what it was you first click-held for) - VERY nice improvement on land clearing, btw.

I've been playing 2.0, the game crashed when I built the second land expansion shrine, and also while leashing a builder to build the Shrine of Voyages. Overall the game is a lot less clickity, but you still have to wait a fixed set of time to collect belief and build stuff like a free-to-play Facebook game. The villagers look much more alive, they interact with each other and have some funny animations when they are not doing anything.One thing that bothered me is that you can no longer rotate the camera. It didn't work very well before, but now it's not available at all, it's complicated to see what's behind a tree or other obstacle and there's no other solution than to destoy it. I still haven't unlocked the Voyages mode or the God Powers menu, so I can't give my opinions on those yet.

Thanks for the update!I've tested right up to the settlement tutorial, which proves to be a stop bug for me: where it tells me to select the settlement card in the settlement menu, I seem unable to click on it (except for the info button). Since the tutorial is mandatory, I'm stuck. The problem seems not to be linked to screen mode & resolution, even though the card seems to be pretty far into the border region (vs. title-safe area)

Thanks for the update!I've tested right up to the settlement tutorial, which proves to be a stop bug for me: where it tells me to select the settlement card in the settlement menu, I seem unable to click on it (except for the info button). Since the tutorial is mandatory, I'm stuck. The problem seems not to be linked to screen mode & resolution, even though the card seems to be pretty far into the border region (vs. title-safe area)

Hmmm, that's definitely an odd one. Have you tried hitting Esc during the tutorial to see if there's an "Abandon" option? Not sure if it's in the current build at the moment, but there used to be a way to kind of manually exit a tutorial via the abandon option in the menu. Might be a possible workaround in the meantime. If it still persists, please submit this report to Support@22cans.com. Thanks!

What exactly is the purpose of Buffers? Either I clicked the tooltip for it away too fast and missed the explanation or there is no real explanation - either way I have no idea what those guys are doing.